The approach to landing and touch down on the runway of an aircraft can be a challenging task. To perform the landing properly, the aircraft approaches the runway within an envelope of attitude, course, speed, and rate of descent limits. The course limits include, for example, both lateral limits and glide slope limits. An approach outside of this envelope can result in an undesirable positioning of the aircraft with respect to the runway.
When using a typical navigation map display to indicate approach landing state, depending on the current display scale settings and phase of approach, the runway icon can very small and not suitable to display the relevant landing state information such predicted touch down point and the predicted stopping point. As such, an iconized, dedicated runway display for indicating current landing state is best suitable for timely and unambiguous information to flight crews.
Aircraft must be in correct configurations or energy state to complete an effective landing. Clear and unambiguous information to flight crews about the present and predicted energy state are critical for flight crews to make adjustment or decisions. Integration of this type of information into traditional moving map displays has several draw backs: (1) In aircraft centered display mode typically used for final approach segment, the runway symbol could be very small and cannot provide clear indication of the energy state information; (2) When using a moving map display, the airport and runway objects are typically shown to scale in order to accommodate other necessary navigation and traffic objects on the map. The scaling necessary for a moving map can also make the proper display of energy state information difficult to visualize for flight crews during the critical time period.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a system and method for improving the ability to fly stabilized landings including displaying information supporting a pilot's ability to fly the landings. Furthermore, other desirable features and characteristics of the exemplary embodiments will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.